Exploring Albert Rijksbaron's book, The Syntax and Semantics of the Verb in Classical Greek: An Introduction, to see how it would need to be adapted for Koine Greek. Much of the focus will be on finding Koine examples to illustrate the same points Rijksbaron illustrates with Classical examples, and places where Koine Greek diverges from Classical Greek.

Eeli Kaikkonen wrote:But it's rewarding. And the writer's good understanding about the subject matter shines through. Sometimes it seems that especially selection of the examples is a work of a genius. That, of course, makes selecting and explaining good NT (or rather Koine) counterparts challenging.

Bingo. Which makes it a challenge worthy of B-Greek.

Eeli Kaikkonen wrote:I see also one big problem. This would easily lead to pressing Koine into the same mold than Classical Greek. It would be easy to neglect counter-examples. It would be easy to loose different nuances. This requires highly competent project leaders.

I'm thinking about the organization of the subforum. It might be good to have threads for discussing individual sections and places where Koine diverges from what is described, as well as very specific threads for examples of particular constructions.

I hope Rijksbaron's explanatory framework holds up for Koine Greek, even if we have to accomodate some differences. It would be a lot more convenient if it did. Do you suspect it does not?

You were intending perhaps to have Brill publish it and sell it at an exorbitant price,
as they did with Rutger Allan's dissertation? I paid the outlandish price for that book
long before you revealed (I think you're the snitch!) that it was accessible as a PDF
in the original formatting of the dissertation.

Stephen Carlson wrote:Sure. I'm might want to separate the material and discussion, like Wikipedia, but we can move posts to new topics as moderators, so it might just be nice to let things grow a bit organically.

I think so. If we ever decide to actually write something along the lines of Wikipedia articles, we'd have to set up a framework for that, e.g. a MediaWiki instance for it.

What was written here is good common sense. One might add that one also needs to take into account whether a text is intentionally literary, e.g. Lucian, or non-literary, e.g. Musonius Rufus and Greek papyri as in Moulton and Milligan's lexicon. Epigraphic texts can be either; a tomb inscription is likely non literary, an honorific decree closer to literary, e.g. the great calendar inscription from Priene
Ed Krentz

Edgar Krentz
Prof. Emeritus of NT
Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago

We can't "modify" anything in Rijksbaron's book. (Jonathan wrote: "Would we need to modify this note?"). We can only annotate it here, externally. Even taking text from Rijksbaron and writing something new based on it would be a copyright violation. "Fair use" must be of course remembered, but basically we have to write new text instead of modifying existing one. A reader must have Rijksbaron's book at hand. We can give new notes and examples here. (I don't think Jonathan meant actually modifying the original, but I want to clarify.)

What will be the pace of the series? Once written the threads and posts are of course there to read and comment on afterwards, but I would feel much more comfortable if we handled a short chunk of text at a time and spend enough time with that for people to get familiar with it and do some research. Many people would have only little time for such a project, maybe a couple of hours per week, I guess. If it's too fast, people will drop off rather than read everything through and research and comment it.

My thought was to take one section at a time, and stick with it until we've dealt with it adequately. You'll notice that everything I put up today is from section 1, 2 1/2 pages of the book. And of course, people can turn to earlier parts at any time.

And yes, people will need a copy of Rijksbaron to participate in this thread.

If this turns into a book of its own (which is a possibility, but not yet a plan), then of course we would have to write our own text. But my thought model at this point is very much along these lines: if I were Rijksbaron, republishing this for Koine, what would I do? That's why I used the phrase "would we need to modify this note". I may slip and say things like that, but obviously, if this turns into any kind of publication, someone would have to write it. If we did decide to write a book, I'd like to make it freely available, with a Creative Commons license, and we'd have to find one or more authors to write the book, figure out how to credit people who participate in this thread, etc. But there's no concrete plan to do that, at least yet.

Eeli Kaikkonen wrote:I see also one big problem. This would easily lead to pressing Koine into the same mold than Classical Greek. It would be easy to neglect counter-examples. It would be easy to loose different nuances. This requires highly competent project leaders.

I agree. We should definitely seek out and debate counter-examples. Also, I think we should consult BDF or BDR at every point.